This website is a searchable online resource for articles and reporting on foreign fighters in the Syrian/Iraqi conflict. Its aim is to bring together significant research and writing on this new phenomenon, and make them easily accessible to researchers, students, and policymakers. The project is run by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) (www.icsr.info).

From the start of the Islamic State’s rise through the chaos of the Syrian war, Turkey has played a central, if complicated, role in the group’s story. For years, it served as a rear base, transit hub and shopping bazaar for the Islamic State, and at first, that may have protected Turkey from the violence the group has inflicted elsewhere.

The Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point (United States Military Academy) recently made available a report, which provides data of some 4,600 foreign fighters recruited between early 2013 and 2014. What has become clear from the data presented is that the IS recruits from over 70 countries and that means the global workforce IS commands brings with them different skills and capabilities. The educational backgrounds of foreign fighters vary widely and the group has benefitted enormously as most of the fighters have received higher education.

Al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, Jabat al-Nusra, just absorbed Syrian militant group Army of Muhammed, increasing its power in northern Syria as the Islamic State continues to lose territory. The Army of Muhammed is largely comprised of Libyan and French foreign fighters, and it is the latest in a series of foreign fighters who are swearing allegiance to Jabat al-Nusra.

A ‘kill list’ of hundreds of foreign-born Islamic State fighters, including more than 20 Britons, has been drawn up by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. A dossier of the British fighters contained on a computer disc has been obtained by this newspaper. It was handed by President Assad to two Conservative MPs who were invited to visit the tyrant in Damascus in the spring.

This article explores how Western fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are reportedly pleading with their home country’s diplomats to come home as ISIS is pressed on several fronts. Among those pleading to come home are Western citizens, including women, who moved to Iraq and Syria after being enthralled with online ISIS propaganda.